Google's Gemini AI now approaches human expert performance in spreadsheet manipulation, achieving a 70.48% success rate on the public SpreadsheetBench benchmark.
The milestone arrives alongside a sweeping beta update that embeds generative AI across Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive for paying subscribers. The company announced the capabilities today as a direct counter to Microsoft's Copilot Wave 3 announcement yesterday.
Google's Workspace suite gains what it calls "Help me create" functionality, a bottom-bar interface where users describe documents in plain language and Gemini pulls relevant information from files, Gmail, and Drive to produce first drafts.
In Sheets specifically, the "Fill with Gemini" feature auto-populates table cells with summarized or categorized data sourced from the web or user files. An internal study of 95 participants comparing manual entry against the AI tool showed a ninefold speed improvement on 100-cell tasks.
Slides receives an updated generation tool that creates individual slides matching presentation themes and can edit them based on follow-up prompts like "adjust colors" or "simplify layout." Full deck generation from a single prompt remains marked as "coming soon."
Drive transforms from passive storage into what Google describes as an active knowledge base. Search results now surface AI Overviews at the top, cited summaries similar to those in Google Search, while "Ask Gemini in Drive" lets users pose complex questions across selected files without opening documents.
All new features roll out today in beta to Google AI Ultra and Pro subscribers, the consumer-facing paid tiers that replaced the Google One AI Premium branding. They're available worldwide for Docs, Sheets, and Slides but initially US-only for Drive functionality.
The timing highlights the intensifying productivity suite competition between Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 as both companies race to embed generative AI into enterprise workflows.
